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Earnings by College Major – Engineers and Scientists at the Top

Posted on October 29, 2013  Comments (5)

graph of earnings by college-major

Median annual income by major based on data from the Georgetown Center On Education And The Workforce – via blog post: The Most And Least Lucrative College Majors.

As we have posted about for years engineers do very well financially. This chart shows the median income by college major (the data includes those who went on to get advanced degrees) based on data for the USA. See the data on those that only have bachelors degrees. Also see a detailed post from the Curious Cat Economics blog looking at the value of college degrees based on the Georgetown data.

Engineering holds 6 of the top spots in the graph shown above and 8 of the top spots for those that didn’t earn an advanced degree. Pharmacy-sciences-and-administration and Math-and-computer-sciences made the top 10 of both lists. Pharmacology and health-and-medical-prepatory-programs make the list when advanced degrees are included.

The highest earning major, petroleum engineering, with $120,000 doesn’t have an increase for those with advanced degrees. The 10th spot goes to electrical engineering with a $94,000 median income.

Related: No Surprise – Engineering Graduates Continue to Reign Supreme – Engineering Again Dominates The Highest Paying College Degree Programs – Engineering Majors Hold 8 of Top 10 Highest Paid Majors – The Labor Market for Software Developers

One Scientists 20 Year Effort to Defeat Dengue Fever

Posted on June 12, 2012  Comments (2)

As I have said many times scientific breakthroughs often follow many years of effort. Here is a great example of a scientist putting in great work for years and it looks like it is about to payoff for hundreds of millions of people.

A Scientist’s 20-Year Quest To Defeat Dengue Fever

Now as I said, Scott’s been pushing this idea of using Wolbachia to control dengue for decades, for a most of that time without any success. I asked Scott what it takes to stick with something for that long.

“I think being obsessive,” he replied. “Being maybe a little ill in that regard. And it’s just that I seem to have focused my obsession onto Wolbachia instead of on to postage stamps or model trains.”

And even though his obsession has brought him to the point where he’s shown he can get his Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to spread in the wild, that’s not the success he’s ultimately after. “Success for me is having a significant impact on dengue disease in communities,” he says.

To do that, he’ll have to release his mosquitoes in a place where there’s a lot of dengue, and then see if that brings down the number of cases of the disease in humans. Those studies are being planned now.

The stakes are high. By some estimates, more than a billion people around the world are at risk for getting dengue. Even if it doesn’t kill you, I’m told a case of dengue can make you feel so bad, wish you were dead.
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But Scott says it’s not yet time to celebrate.

“We’ve got some good preliminary data, and we’re on the path. And it’s looking good. But you know I am a realist. It could fall over at any day,” says Scott.

Related: Engineering Mosquitoes to be Flying Vaccinators – Scientists Building a Safer Mosquito (2006) – Video showing malaria breaking into cell – Treated Mosquito Nets Prevent Malaria

Baboons Learn to Recognize Hundreds of Words

Posted on April 15, 2012  Comments (1)

The (Monkey) Business Of Recognizing Words by Jon Hamilton

[Jonathan Grainger, researcher, Aix-Marseille University] says a baboon named Dan learned more than 300 words. “Dan’s our star baboon,” he says. “He’s a high-performing individual, basically. He does well in most tasks.”

But here’s the amazing thing: Dan and the other baboons also learned to tell whether a string of letters they’d never seen before was an English word. That’s something first-graders learn to do when they start reading, but scientists had assumed that children were simply sounding out the letters to decide whether they make sense.

Of course, the baboons couldn’t do this because they’re not learning to read a language they already speak. They had to rely on a part of the brain that can tell whether objects fit a known pattern.
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Michael Platt, who directs the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, says he was surprised by what the baboons were able to do.

“I was really looking for holes to poke in this study, but it was very difficult to find any because it was really beautifully done,” he says. “And I think the linchpin here was that the baboons, once they had learned the rule, could generalize to new words that they had not seen before.”

Platt says when you think about it, the finding makes sense, given what’s known about human and animal brains. “Brains are always looking for patterns,” he says. “They are always looking to make some statistical pattern analysis of the features and events that are in the environment. And this would just be one of those.”

Platt says that’s a big departure from the idea that reading is a direct extension of spoken language.

One questions I have, is why the experiment done in France tested wether the Baboons could recognize English words?

Related: Brain Reorganizes As It Learns Math – Bird Brain Experiments – How Humans Got So Smart – How Our Brain Resolves Sight

The Politics of Anti-Science

Posted on August 30, 2011  Comments (8)

In the 1960’s the USA had an unrealistic view of how much studying and learning about science and engineering could do. Investing is science and engineering is an extremely wise economic (and cultural) endeavor but it isn’t going to solve all the problems that exist. Somehow today we find ourselves with a large number of politically powerful people we take strong anti-science positions. These tactics reduce funding and support for beneficial research and are short sited approaches to public administration. This is an unfortunate turn of events that is damaging the American economy and will have huge damages going forward.

Thankfully other countries have seen how wise investing in science and engineering is and have more than taken up the slack created by the anti-science community. Two favorite tactics of the anti-science leaders is to try and create confusion where there is none and to turn the focus away from serious matters and instead playing silly political games. The silly games will draw donors and voters so if they care about those things more than the country and the future of the country it is a sound tactic. The damage it causes the country however I would hope would limit the use of such tactics however that has not been the case recently.

‘Shrimp On A Treadmill’: The Politics Of ‘Silly’ Studies

Take the case of the “shrimp on a treadmill.” Burnett says the senator’s report linked that work to a half-million-dollar research grant. But that money actually went to a lot of different research that he and his colleagues did on this economically important seafood species.

The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator’s report was misleading, says Burnett, “and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.”

John Hart, a Coburn spokesperson, said in an email that “our report never claimed all the money was spent on shrimp on a treadmill. The scientists doth protest too much. Receiving federal funds is a privilege, not a right. If they don’t want their funding scrutinized, don’t ask.”

What the politicians are doing is exactly what this spokesperson suggests – they are withdrawing from the anti-science culture created by some in Washington: they are moving their research to countries that support rather than attack science. That is a very bad thing for the USA. There are a number of very bad economic policies a government can take. Driving scientists and engineers into the arms of other countries is one of the worst.
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Diet May Help ADHD Kids More Than Drugs

Posted on March 13, 2011  Comments (2)

Diet May Help ADHD Kids More Than Drugs

Kids with ADHD can be restless and difficult to handle. Many of them are treated with drugs, but a new study says food may be the key. Published in The Lancet journal, the study suggests that with a very restrictive diet, kids with ADHD could experience a significant reduction in symptoms.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Lidy Pelsser of the ADHD Research Centre in the Netherlands, writes in The Lancet that the disorder is triggered in many cases by external factors — and those can be treated through changes to one’s environment. “ADHD, it’s just a couple of symptoms — it’s not a disease,” the Dutch researcher tells All Things Considered weekend host Guy Raz.

The way we think about — and treat — these behaviors is wrong, Pelsser says. “There is a paradigm shift needed. If a child is diagnosed ADHD, we should say, ‘OK, we have got those symptoms, now let’s start looking for a cause.’ ”
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According to Pelsser, 64 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD are actually experiencing a hypersensitivity to food. Researchers determined that by starting kids on a very elaborate diet, then restricting it over a few weeks’ time. “It’s only five weeks,” Pelsser says. “If it is the diet, then we start to find out which foods are causing the problems.”

Teachers and doctors who worked with children in the study reported marked changes in behavior. “In fact, they were flabbergasted,” Pelsser says.

Related: Nearly 1 million Children Potentially Misdiagnosed with ADHD in the USA – Lifestyle Drugs and Risk – Over-reliance on Prescription Drugs to Aid Children’s Sleep? – Epidemic of Diagnoses
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Ants Counting Their Step

Posted on November 30, 2009  Comments (6)

Ants That Count!

Most ants get around by leaving smell trails on the forest floor that show other ants how to get home or to food. They squeeze the glands that cover their bodies; those glands release a scent, and the scents in combination create trails the other ants can follow.

That works in the forest, but it doesn’t work in a desert. Deserts are sandy and when the wind blows, smells scatter.
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It’s already known that ants use celestial clues to establish the general direction home, but how do they know exactly the number of steps to take that will lead them right to the entrance of their nest?

Wolf and Whittlinger trained a bunch of ants to walk across a patch of desert to some food. When the ants began eating, the scientists trapped them and divided them into three groups. They left the first group alone. With the second group, they used superglue to attach pre-cut pig bristles to each of their six legs, essentially putting them on stilts.
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The regular ants walked right to the nest and went inside. The ants on stilts walked right past the nest, stopped and looked around for their home…

I posted about this back in 2006: Ants on Stilts for Science, but the webcast by NPR is worth a new post.

Related: E.O. Wilson: Lord of the Ants – Huge Ant Nest – posts showing the scientific method of learning in action

Crows Can Recognize People

Posted on July 28, 2009  Comments (3)

Crows can recognize people and remember them for years. Listen to this interesting report from NPR. Researchers alienated a crow, and then were razzed and harassed by its family and neighbors wherever they go.

Related: Cool Crow Research – Friday Cat Fun #10: Cat and Crow Friends – Smart Crows

Many Bird Species Declining In USA

Posted on April 1, 2009  Comments (2)

photo of a Rusty Blackbirdphoto of a Rusty blackbird, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Report Warns Many Bird Species Declining In U.S.

“The rusty blackbird is a great example of what the ‘State of the Birds‘ is really trying to get at. Somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of population has been lost within the last 40 years,” says Ziolkowski. “The biggest factor is probably loss of wetland habitat. Most populations of birds are really declining now primarily because of rampant development and urban sprawl.”

The report includes some good news about birds that were on the brink of extinction but have rebounded because of conservation efforts, including the Laysan duck and the wild turkey. But it also says many bird species are in trouble — including birds that live on the oceans, in grasslands, in deserts, in the Arctic, on the coasts, in wetlands and in forests.

Development, agriculture, energy production, pollution, invasive species and climate change all put birds at risk.
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The report shows that many other birds are in trouble. Half of the birds that migrate along on the coasts are declining, and so are many seabirds and lots of the birds that live in grasslands and in deserts.

And despite Hawaii’s reputation for rich flora and fauna, more bird species are vulnerable to extinction there than any place else.

Related: Backyard Wildlife: Crows – Speciation of Dendroica Warblers – Bird Species Plummeted After West Nile – Backyard Wildlife: Sharpshinned

Science Seeks Stimulas Spending

Posted on February 12, 2009  Comments (0)

Scientists Hope Stimulus Will Give Jolt To Research by Richard Harris

The stimulus package contains billions of dollars of funding for the National Institutes of Health — money that could create a quick financial jolt for young workers and university towns.

There are 3,000 institutions around the country that receive NIH grants to fund biomedical research. Raynard Kington, the NIH’s acting director, says those labs are also well-positioned to absorb a jolt of financial stimulus quickly.

“We have literally 14,000 applications that have been peer reviewed, that have been found to be scientifically meritorious and that have been approved for funding — but that we don’t have funds to support,” he says.

Give the NIH the money, he says, and in just a few weeks the money can flow out the door and into a thousand labs or more.

Related: Billions for Science in Stimulus Bill – posts on funding – Symptom of America’s Decline in Particle Physics – Funding Medical Research

Tardigrades

Posted on January 27, 2009  Comments (5)

Tardigrades (commonly known as water bears) have eight legs and are their own phylum on the tree of life. Some can survive temperatures close to absolute zero, temperatures as high as 151 °C (303 °F), 1,000 times more radiation than any other animal, nearly a decade without water, and even the vacuum of space.

Related: Tardigrades, UNC Chapel Hill – Tardigrades In Space (TARDIS) – What is an Extremophile? – Evolution, Methane, Jobs, Food and More

Evolution, Methane, Jobs, Food and More

Posted on January 17, 2009  Comments (2)

photo of sunset on Mars
Photo from May 2005 by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars.

Science Friday is a great National Public Radio show. The week was a great show covering Antimicrobial Copper, Top Jobs for Math and Science, Human-Driven Evolution, Methane On Mars, Fish with Mercury and more. This show, in particular did a great job of showing the scientific inquiry process in action.

“Fishing regulations often prescribe the taking of larger fish, and the same often applies to hunting regulations,” said Chris Darimont, one of the authors of the study. “Hunters are instructed not to take smaller animals or those with smaller horns. This is counter to patterns of natural predation, and now we’re seeing the consequences of this management.” Darimont and colleagues found that human predation accelerated the rate of observable trait changes in a species by 300 percent above the pace observed within purely natural systems, and 50 percent above that of systems subject to other human influences, such as pollution

Very interesting stuff, listen for more details. A part of what happens is those individuals that chose to focus on reproducing early (instead of investing in growing larger, to reproduce later) are those that are favored (they gain advantage) by the conditions of human activity. I am amazed how quickly the scientists says the changes in populations are taking place.

And Methane On Mars is another potentially amazing discovery. While it is far from providing proof of live on Mars it is possibly evidence of life on Mars. Which would then be looked back on as one of the most important scientific discoveries ever. And in any even the podcast is a great overview of scientists in action.

This week astronomers reported finding an unexpected gas — methane — in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, a major source of methane is biological activity. However, planetary scientists aren’t ready to say that life on Mars is to blame for the presence of the gas there, as geochemical processes could also account for the finding. The find is intriguing especially because the researchers say they have detected seasonal variations of methane emissions over specific locations on the planet.

Martian Methane Reveals the Red Planet is not a Dead Planet
The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?

Related: Mars Rover Continues Exploration – Copper Doorknobs and Faucets Kill 95% of Superbugs – Viruses and What is Life – posts on evolution – Science and Engineering Link Directory